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Self and meditation in Indian Buddhism / 155
salutary or otherwise, is to be performed" (na kimcit kusaladikarma kartavyam).
We have seen that non-Buddhists practised asceticism in order to evoke painful experiences which were taken to be the fruition of earlier deeds. The Buddha had rejected this notion as well as the need for painful asceticism. However, the traditional biography of the Buddha before his enlightenment, i.e., when he was still Bodhisattva, includes a long period of severe asceticism. It has been pointed out, most recently by Minoru Hara,11) that a number of accounts of the life of the Buddha depict his pre-enlightenment asceticism as a way to deliver him from defilement incurred in an earlier existence.
The practices which were introduced, or attempted to be introduced, into Buddhism did not only concern suppression of bodily action and of the senses. Suppression of mental activity, too, is prominent. Consider first the following.
The Vitakkasanthana Sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya and its parallels in Chinese translation recommend the practising monk to 'restrain his thought with his mind, to coerce and torment it'. Exactly the same words are used elsewhere in the Pali canon (in the Mahasaccaka Sutta, Bodhirajakumara Sutta and Sangārava Sutta) in order to describe the futile attempts of the Buddha before his enlightenment to reach liberation after the manner of the Jainas. The passage from the third Bhavanakrama just cited states, similarly, that "nothing is to be thought on" (na kimcic cintayitavyam). Other indications show that suppression of mental activity, though rejected by the Buddha, came to characterise much that became known as Buddhist meditation.
Let us first look at the so-called eight Liberations (vimokşa / vimokkha). They are the following:
11) Minoru Hara, "A note on the Buddha's asceticism: The Liu du ji jing (Six Paramita-sutra) 53," Bauddhavidyasudhakaraḥ: Studies in Honour of Heinz Bechert on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. Petra Kieffer-Pülz and Jens-Uwe Hartmann, Swisttal-Odendorf 1997 (IndTib 30), pp. 249-260.
